


Sick

by SweetSamOfMine (AudreeJo)



Series: Olivia [7]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Angst and Humor, Case Fic, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Graphic Depictions of Illness, Hallucifer, Hallucinations, Protective Sam Winchester, Sleep Deprivation, Smart Sam Winchester, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-27
Updated: 2014-12-26
Packaged: 2018-03-03 16:56:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 18,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2858168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AudreeJo/pseuds/SweetSamOfMine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Winchesters are racing the clock when a strange illness befalls a small town and starts claiming victims. The answer for how to stop it isn't clear and everything gets much worse when it infects someone close to them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Sam didn’t even think to put the hand towel back on the rack before rushing to the door to answer Liv’s knock. He opened the motel door still holding it, never having finished drying his hands completely after his morning shave. He stood in the doorway with an eager grin to greet her, taking up the whole slot of the open space between the door and the threshold. Liv smiled up at him, a cup of coffee in either hand, a white robe thrown over her t-shirt and pajama pants, and one side of her hair falling across her shoulder, already curled, while the other side was thrown in what could only be described as a hasty knot.

Not her best look, but Sam didn’t seem to notice.

“Hey!” he said. His smile reached his eyes and they washed over her with just a touch of relief. Liv would think it was the coffee she was delivering, but that wasn’t it.

“Morning,” she replied. They were stupid, she thought. Really stupid and annoying, the way new couples can be sometimes, when they see each other after only a few hours but act like they’re reuniting after months, and they can’t stop smiling big dumb grins and exchanging long looks at each other, getting lost in the other’s eyes but saying nothing, looking to anyone on the outside like they’re just staring at each other for no reason, like two freaks. Stupid, and happy, and cute, and annoying. If anyone paid attention too long at least.

She felt stupid, but she also figured life was too short to care.

“Coffee!” Sam exclaimed.

“Yeah they finally started brewing some up front, but it’s not very good.” She handed Sam a cup. “I did what I could. They had cinnamon.”

“I’m sure it’s fine, thanks.”

Dean grumbled from within, “Is she finally ready?” Liv pushed the door completely open so he could see her. Dean gave his classic eye-roll. “You gotta fix your hair to go on a hunt?”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she replied, bringing her free hand up to her chest in surprise. “I didn’t realize you were able to roll out of bed clean shaven, smelling of cologne, with you hair already gelled up. You will _have_ to show me your secret.”

Dean, narrowing his eyes, was lost behind the door again as Sam swung it back to cover his brother. The door slot belonged to just him once again. He gazed down at her with the usual smirk he wore when Liv was poking the bear.

“He hates me,” she whispered, amused.

“No he doesn’t,” Sam assured her.

“Well, this is for him,” she handed Sam the other coffee. “But he didn’t get cinnamon.”

“Nice.”

“I’m gonna go finish getting ready.” She made no move to leave.

“'Kay.” He stayed standing where he was in the doorway.

After another stupid long-look exchange, Liv grabbed his under shirt and tugged him into a swift kiss. Sam held the two coffees out to the sides as he bent down to reach her.

Liv didn’t glance back as she returned to her motel room, even though she really wanted to. She figured as doe-eyed as the two of them were with each other right now, she might as well try to play it cool when she could. At least no one could see the grin she was unable to wipe off her face as she entered the room and then bathroom to start back on her hair. Thankfully seeing herself in the mirror forced her to get her dumb face under control.

She noticed herself starting to rush to finish getting ready as she began her make up. She felt the old familiar twinge of anxiety you get when you’re running late but don’t want to mess up the wings of your eyeliner. It made her step back from the mirror and drop her hands from her face. Dean usually never got to her, in fact driving him crazy was something she had always really enjoyed. She had been great at it right from the start and it was just the way her and Dean interacted. It was the easiest way to deal with his contrary nature towards Liv’s presence. After an exchange like the one she and Dean had just had, Liv would have usually slowed down and taken even longer.

But not this time, and she wasn’t sure the reason.

What was different? Why, all of a sudden, was she feeling mild panic at the thought of him being annoyed with her? He was always annoyed with her! Yes, Dean was Sam’s brother and he was always and would always be ….around. And sure, she had always figured by this point, Dean would have warmed a bit more to her than he had.

She began to chew on her bottom lip.

It’s not like she needed him to like her. She wasn’t looking for his approval and even if he tried to give it, she’d make sure to give him hell for thinking she ever wanted it. She just always assumed that one day what she considered playful antogonism would melt away and at the core, he really would like her. But suddenly it struck her, what if he never did?

Liv shook her head at herself in the mirror. She didn’t appreciate this new line of thinking. Come on, she wasn’t the kind of person who cared what anyone thought of her! She always did what she wanted regardless. Dean’s snark was a challenge to just be more _whatever it was she was at the time he snarked._ The fact that she had let him change the way she did anything, even if it was just the speed she put her make up on, irritated her. She drew in a deep breath, then went about finishing up at her normal pace and made sure to pull herself back if she caught herself trying to rush again. In fact, she went back over her eye make up twice.

\--

“So this town’s got an uptick in hospital deaths in the last three month,” Dean said, flipping through some notes on a yellow legal pad and taking a bite of a sprinkled donut. “Really weird coincidence, but nothing linking any of them, medically?”

“Nope, not that I can see,” Sam responded, pointing at an assortment of printed articles, highlighted local newspaper clippings laid across the bed of their hotel room, and his laptop screen.  “The doctors never even considered them to be connected. Each of the victims of these five-day illnesses all suffer from different symptoms and even different causes of death.”

“This one eventually died of heart disease, this one of, woa, throat cancer…?” Liv observed, looking over the notes strewn out on the bed. She sat her coffee down on the bedside table like reading over this stuff took her craving away.

“Yup, they thought it was just really aggressive cancer, that they must have overlooked it in prior checkups, but he went in last week with difficulty swallowing, then three days later he was dead.”

Liv shook her head as her eyes travelled over the other clippings. “...and this one died of TB, this one of severe _burns_? My _God_! And it’s like these things just appeared out of no where.”

“Across five days in each case. And in weird stages. The woman with TB had never even been out of the state. It’s bizarre,” Sam agreed.

“How’re the docs explaining all this?” asked Dean.

Sam shook his head, eyes continuing to scan through information on his laptop. “I don’t really know. It’s got people in town freaked, though.” He turned the computer screen to face Dean where an article from the local newspaper read: _“Ill Fate: Town faces strange curse-like death toll.”_

“Superstition always wins,” Dean muttered as he read Sam’s laptop screen.

“And that headline may not be too far off from what’s actually causing this.”

“You think a curse, then?” Liv asked.

“Or something like it,” Sam replied. “There’s all kinds of lore about demonic sickness, plagues, and curses. We just have to figure out how people are being infected or cursed, or whatever this is. Is it a person or is it a cursed object? Or something even bigger? Like... Biblical?”

“Dude, don’t even go there,” Dean grumbled. “We’ve officially ruled out hex bags, then?”

“Doesn’t really fit,” Liv concluded. “It would take a lot of mojo to orchestrate this kind of thing with just a hex bag.”

“Plus I swept every victim’s house myself yesterday when we went to interview the families,” Sam added. “Not one seemed to have been broken into at any recent time, not one had any remnants of witchcraft that I could tell. It would be a long shot.”

Dean pursed his lips but nodded in agreement. “And the hex bag would have had to travel with them to the hospital to finish ‘em off…” He sighed. It would be easier if it was something like that, but pushing for it wouldn’t make it true.

“So where do we go from here?” Liv asked.

“One other victim died just a day or so before we came in,” Sam suggested. “We haven’t talked to his family yet.”

Liv started a _“Sounds good”_ but was cut off by Dean who snapped his finger as though he had just experienced an epiphany.

“Ya know,” he said, perking up. “This may be a dead end, but at least three or four of those families mentioned that their victim visited this shop downtown the week they got sick. Called _‘Something Java...Something-or-other.’_ It’s like a local cafe. Every one of them mentioned it casually, like I should have heard of it.”

Liv was already drumming away on her laptop. “Was it… ‘Gustava Java’?”

“Yeah, that was it!”

“Cute name.”

“It’s not much, but it’s the only other link we have between any of the victims.”

“Says here it’s ‘right off of 4th and Main, downtown.’ ‘Locally owned Cafe,’ ‘imports the finest coffee from all over the world.’ Oh! And check this, apparently Gustava just fell under new management.” She turned her laptop for the boys to see the new owner’s mission statement.

Sam was at his keyboard next. Within seconds he had an article pulled up about how, within the last few months, Gustava Java was sold and the old owners moved away. It was pretty big news in this small town because everyone who drank coffee visited the cafe on a regular basis. “This is definitely something,” Sam proclaimed, grabbing a clipping from the bed. “The first victim died just a week and a half after the new owners took over that cafe.”

Dean and Liv crowded over Sam’s shoulder to see for themselves, Dean looking pretty pleased with himself.  “Alright! Well looks like I’m headed _there_ today,” he said.

“And I’ll hit that last victim’s place for an interview,” Sam declared, setting his laptop aside and standing.

“Cool. We’ll meet back here this afternoon and decide what our next move is.”

“You’re thinking long-haired FBI agent, again, aren’t you?” teased Liv, turning to Sam.

“C’mon, it’s the easiest cover I have,” Sam smiled.

Liv rolled her eyes playfully. “I bet I could throw something together that was slightly more believable--”

“Oh here we go,” Dean groaned. “Playin’ dress up again.” Liv raised her eyebrow humorlessly at Dean. Usually she would quip back but she felt herself stiffen up instead. Her reaction earlier made her hyper aware of Dean zoning in on her and she didn’t feel like playing along this time. “I’ll leave and come back and you’ll still be brushin’ Sam’s hair,” Dean continue in his regular annoyed tone. He heaved an impatient sigh. “Maybe you should come with me! At least then I’d know something was getting done.”

At first Sam was smiling awkwardly, expecting the usual Dean and Liv antics, but he caught wind of the strange shift in the dynamic long before Dean had, and the smile fell from his face.

“Fine,” Liv responded.

Dean’s overly animated annoyed face was struck blank. “Wait, what?”

Liv’s jaw set and she approached Dean. _Big talk,_ she thought, just to be a dick. _Like me and Sam haven’t done plenty of cases just fine together. Nut up or shut up._ “Sounds like I’m going with you to the cafe.”

Dean looked like he slightly regretted his entire life.


	2. Chapter 2

It wasn’t that Liv and Dean had never been alone together. They had. They had worked plenty of cases where they had ended up one-on-one and they worked just fine. The difference this time was that there was very clear tension and it was no longer one-sided. The tension Dean had always held towards Liv was expected, accepted, considered normal. It was no big deal, Liv always had fun with it and found ways to use it against him. It worked when it was just Dean with the problem, whatever the hell it was. But now there was no banter, there was no fun, because the only thing that met Dean’s tension was Liv’s in return, and they weren’t quite sure how to deal with this kind of situation just yet. An actual confrontation, something Liv had gracefully avoided and danced around for months, seemed nigh on the horizon.

Especially because the drive to the cafe hadn’t really eased any of the issues between the two of them, not when it only made sense for Sam to take the Impala and for Dean to ride shotgun in Liv’s car for maybe only the third time in his life. Not when he didn’t have a thing to say on the way that wasn’t either criticizing how she drove, the route she took, or the music she chose to play. Not when he was so clueless about Liv’s growing anger that he didn’t realize he was only making a volatile situation worse. Luckily the music complaint just gave Liv an excuse to throw his own dumb rule, _“Driver picks the music, shotgun shuts his cake hole,”_ back in his face. She blared Katy Perry the rest of the way.

“Goddammit, O!” he bitched as they entered Gustava Java. “I’m gonna be hummin’ _Teenage Dream_ for the rest of the week.”

 _Good_ , she thought, but she didn’t respond to him.

After an awkward pause she heard him say, “Oh- _kay_ …”

She ignored him again. What did he expect her to respond with anyways?

She scanned the room. It was pretty much empty except for a man in his mid-forties stocking the biscotti next to the coffee wall and a barista cleaning the steamer behind the counter. Mellow music poured smoothly from the speakers in each corner of the restaurant. The air smelled like cinnamon and dark coffee, there were tables and chairs set up all over in odd formations, and there was all kinds of Latin-American art on the walls. It was actually pretty charming.

The man stocking turned away from the shelves to smile at Liv and Dean. “Afternoon, folks,” he said in a cheerful rasp. “Can I help you find anything?”

“Nah, thanks,” Dean responded through a forced smile. “Just driving through town, need a bathroom.”

The man cocked his eyebrow disapprovingly at them, then pointed to a hallway where a bathroom sign was hung. Dean smiled politely then turned to head toward the bathroom to keep up the facade while Liv looked around. He left her with a look that meant _‘stay alert,’_ so Liv nodded curtly at him and showed him that Sam’s knife was just under her jacket if she needed it. Sam had insisted that she take it. Like Dean, Sam had his devil’s trap bullets and a gun if he ran into any demons, after all.

Liv decided to scan the coffee flavors organized against the wall. She smiled at the man who had greeted them as she approached him, still stacking biscotti, and glimpsed his name tag which read: George. George, still apparently wounded that she had only stopped in to let her driving partner use their bathroom and was not likely going to purchase anything, set the last bit of biscotti in its place in dramatic fashion, then stomped back to the counter and through the double doors behind it, where he disappeared. He had not returned her smile. A minute or two later, the barista wiping down the espresso machine tossed his rag in the sink and went through the double doors, too, in a similar huff.

Liv stood blinking in their wake, a little bewildered by this reaction, but she didn’t waste time. If she didn’t have to act normal for the cafe employees and pretend to be interested in actual cafe things while sweeping the place for demonic traces or witchcraft, then great. Let ‘em pout in the back room.

As Dean returned, Liv was finishing up her sweep of the front section.

“Where’d the staff guys go?”

“To the back. They didn’t seem too happy with us using the facilities and bolting.”

“Touchy.”

“Yeah, gave me a chance to look the front over, though.” She twirled her pointer finger in a circle to indicate the whole room. “Not a trace of any spellwork or demons up here, but the place has been immaculately cleaned.”

“So these guys are either really up tight or they have something to hide.”

“More than likely it’s the last. If they have anything going on here, it’s probably in the back.”

Dean started towards the register. “Then let’s see if we can’t get them back out here and ask’em a few questions.” Then Dean doubled back, almost causing Liv to run right into him as he turned. “You checked for sulfur, then?” he asked her.

Liv blinked impatiently at him. “ _Yeah_ , Dean, of course.”

“And for sigils or any weird symbols…”

“ _Yes._ What else would I be doing--?”

“.. or ectoplasm?”

“Dean, what the fuck? Yes! I checked for those things! This isn’t my first hunt!”

Dean’s eyes widened in disbelief. “Well ‘scuse me, princess. I was just making sure, no reason to be so cranky. What the hell is your problem?”

“ _My_ problem?” she scoffed, almost laughing. “Seriously? I’m the one with the problem?”

“Uh, yeah, look at how you’re actin’!”

“What is _your_ problem? You are always on my case about something! Everything I do, if it’s my style, it’s automatically inferior to how you would do it …”

“There ain’t nothing wrong with me asking you to brief me on the status of things!”

Liv saw George peek an eye through the window of one of the swinging doors. She stepped closer to Dean and lowered her voice.

“I told you I swept the front and that it was clear and you still asked me if I checked for the most obvious things like I’m a total idiot!” She pushed passed him and headed for the register. Dean followed close behind her. They kept arguing in hushed tones.

“C’mon, don’t be such a baby! I was just double checking... for me.”

“Oh, so _you’re_ the idiot?”

“I’m not an idiot!”

“Well one of us would have to be for you to need to go over ‘Hunting 101’ with me just now. And I’m pretty sure you meant it to be me!”

“You’re being ridiculous!”’

Seeing them at the register, the barista cheerfully returned from the back room. “Can I get you two guys something, after all?”  Unfortunately the battle waged on in front of him.

“Dean, you tried to tell me how to drive my own car on the way here today!”

“If you accelerate the way I was sayin’, you’d save gas--”

“Different doesn’t automatically equal wrong!”

“You made me listen to Katy Perry!”

That’s when something shifted, the AC cut off in the room or maybe it was the gust of wind from the swinging doors, but all of a sudden the cinnamon and coffee smell subsided and for a split second the smell of sulfur was on the air. Liv’s and Dean’s heads snapped toward the barista. A dawning expression fell across his face and his eyes went black, but before either Dean or Liv could react further, Liv felt the the barista pull her in across the counter by the arm and exhale a strange puff of something at her. It almost felt like when she had walked through a cool mist on a rainy day, but just around her face. A strange fog overcame her senses for what seemed like much longer than it actually was, but as she came out of it Dean was still in the middle of his initial scream. It had barely been seconds.

As she shook out of the haze of whatever had just happened to her, Sam’s knife found its way out of her belt and into the demon’s head. The demon blade made the barista flicker and burn with light, then he slumped against the counter as she pulled the knife back, only letting her arm go when he fell to the floor.

Liv turned, shaking, to see Dean who had only just cocked his gun, his eyes wide.

“What the fuck was that? What the fuck did he do to you?”

 _“I don’t know!”_ she half shrieked. “I don’t know.”

“He breathed something at you!”

“I know, Dean, I was there!”

Dean dropped his gun to his side. “Well, are you alright?”

She hesitated. Her breath was ragged, but that was probably from being so freaked out by what had just occurred. Her heart was beating fast, but again the terror could account for that. The haze itself had passed. She didn’t feel anything at all now, physically at least. “Yeah,” she breathed finally. “Yeah, I think I’m fine.”

“Goddammit, O,” Dean groaned, washing his hand over his face.

“ _Don’t_ you do that!” she growled, finger in his face. “You didn’t notice the sulfur right away either, don’t you--!”

“Alright!” he shouted over her. “Alright, it worked out. The guy’s dead, you’re alive. Let’s keep it that way.”

“What is all this shouting!” The double doors flew open again and George stormed through. As he took in the scene of Liv and Dean standing on the other side of the counter from his dead and bleeding partner, his eyes went demon black. Dean didn’t hesitate. He put a bullet in George’s shoulder. George fell to the floor in agony, screaming in rage that he couldn’t get up. The devil’s trap on the bullet had pinned him.

Dean hopped over the counter with little effort.

“I’ll lock the front door,” Liv muttered. She ran to the door but as she stopped her eyesight began to blink in and out as black spots closed in around her. She blinked hard and shook her head. Deep breath.

_I’m fine._

She switched off the _‘open’_ sign, then snapped the deadbolt into place and raced back behind the counter with Dean, standing over George.

“I’m sure you had plans to smoke out, uh… George,” Dean adjusted George’s nametag with his boot so he could read it upside down. “But we’ve got a few questions for you, compadre.”

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

“So after we got everything we could out of him, we exorcised him,” Dean explained. They were back at the motel and Sam was sitting forward in a chair, listening with a furrowed brow.

“And what all did he tell you?” Sam asked.

“Not a lot,” Dean sighed. “He was just really angry O snuffed his boyfriend.”

Sam and Liv exchanged a look. Sam smiled, Liv tried to return it but it was forced, and he could tell. He noticed she was oddly quiet, standing back behind Dean with her arms crossed tight. He made two mental notes: quiet and visibly upset.

“And he kept saying ‘more will die,’ over and over,” Dean continued.

“Somehow that’s vague and clear at the same time,” quipped Sam.

Dean snorted, amused.

“Well I think I got some useful info,” Sam added, turning to his notes. “When I was talking to the last victim’s parents, something they said stood out to me. They commented that it was especially terrible that their son, Octavio, died of pneumonia because it feels like drowning, which was Octavio’s greatest fear.”

 _“Shit,”_ Dean muttered.

“Yeah, I know. So it got me wondering what the other vics’ greatest fears were, so I did some digging.” Sam shuffled through a few more notes. “I checked with some of the victims’ close friends, shot a few of them an email, and out of the six that responded, five of the deaths lined up with the victim’s greatest fear. Or something that could manifest physically or medically to reflect it, at least.” He extended the notes towards Dean who stepped up and snatched them.

“I’ll be damned,” he said as he read over them. “The burn victim was afraid of fire, the TB victim was afraid of germs, the throat cancer guy was afraid of losing his voice?”

“Apparently he was a musician,” Sam clarified.

Dean handed the notes to Liv, but she didn’t look at them. She just fell back into crossing her arms after she took them. Sam made another mental note.

“Liv, what do you think?” he said, trying to bring her back in.

She perked up for a brief second and cleared her throat. “While Dean interrogated George, I went through the Gustava Java files, documents, and their computers,” she explained in an accidental monotone. She was pale. She seemed kind of shaken. Sam added two more mental notes and his expression started reflecting his concern. “There were no records of any other employees working there since they took over management,” she continued. “As far as I can tell, these two may have been the only two involved in whatever this is.”

Sam watched her, perplexed, but nodded anyways.

“Yeah, I think we got’em,” Dean agreed.

“Alright,” said Sam. “That’s great. We should do some follow-up tomorrow just to make sure there are no other demons involved, but it sounds pretty solid. And that would mean it’s not very likely that any new victims will appear if they haven’t already been infected.”

An awkwardness fell across the room. Dean kept glancing sideways at Liv while Liv would not bring her eyes above the carpet. Sam looked from Dean to Liv and from Liv to Dean in silence, growing more apprehensive as the awkwardness wore on. He was done adding mental notes to discuss with Liv privately later. Sam stood, drawing both their eyes.

“What’s going on?” Sam’s voice was soft but commanding. The edge was only just detectable if you knew him well. Dean exhaled dramatically and turned back to Liv whose eyes fell to the floor again, eyebrows pulling together in the middle as her expression twisted into distress. “Guys!” Sam barked. “What the hell happened?”

“Liv was gassed, or something, by that barista,” Dean confessed, finally.

 _“What?”_ Before Liv realized, Sam had crossed the room and was in front of her.

“I wouldn’t call it ‘gassed’--” Liv objected, weakly, batting Sam’s hands away from her face as he apparently tried to check to see if her eyes were dilated. He could not be deterred.

“He saw that we caught on that he was a demon, so he grabbed her--”

“--we’re not sure what it was, really--”

“--then this weird mist came from his mouth and--”

“--it could have been anything--”

Sam’s hands tilted her chin from one side to the other as he watched her pupils.

“--that’s when I grabbed for my gun--”

“--I only felt weird for a second--”

“--but O got’em with the knife before I could pull the trigger--”

Sam held a pen in front of her face. “Watch the pen, keep your eyes on it,” he instructed.

“--and then I was fine! _I’m fine_ \--!” Liv grabbed the pen from him.

“Liv, you might _not_ be,” Sam protested.

Liv waved her hands in front of her face and backed away from Sam so she could breathe. All this fussing and yelling was making her dizzy. Sam dropped his hands to his sides, worry etched all the way across his furrowed brow.

“I _am_ fine,” she insisted, though her voice cracked. She had to be fine because if she wasn’t she didn’t know what that meant. Did it mean she had royally fucked up? Did it mean she was going to die horribly enduring her worst fear? She wasn’t prepared to consider these things, so she refused, but even so a strange twinge of dread and guilt had already taken hold of her.

“Liv,” Sam pleaded, calmly. “If what Dean said happened to you happened, we have to consider the possibility that…” He trailed off.

“She says she feels fine, Sam,” Dean asserted. “Maybe she is, maybe whatever the demon tried to do didn’t work. I mean, wouldn’t she feel sick or weird or something if she had been infected?”

Sam glanced at Liv who wouldn’t look directly at either Winchester. “Not necessarily,” he answered somberly. “The others didn’t feel bad enough to go to the doctor until day two or three, but they could have felt nearly normal up until then.”

“Shouldn’t we wait and see?”

“Guys--” Liv interjected.

“Do we really want to risk waiting around in denial before we consider something might be wrong?”

“Hey, guys,” Liv interjected, again.

“We have an advantage the others didn’t! We know what could be going on here!”

“But what if--”

 _“Nothing is going on!”_ she screamed. Both boys turned abruptly to her, stunned at the outburst. “I’m fine, okay! I can handle this. I don’t need you two discussing _me_. I’m not the job. I’m not --I’m not the job, okay?” Her breaths were uneven, but it was just from getting so worked up. “We need to finish the actual job, and that means we’re going to do what Sam said, we’re going to follow up about the demons tomorrow. Then we’re going to see if there are any straggling victims who were infected before Dean and I took care of the cafe.”

Awkwardness fell across the room again as she breathed heavily and looked from Winchester to Winchester. It didn’t matter if she hadn’t convinced them. They’d see tomorrow when she woke up completely fine that they were being stupid.

“I’m going to bed,” she grumbled, and she was across the room and out the door before either of the boys could react. She didn’t even close the door behind her.

Dean peaked his head into the hall and watched Liv slam her motel door closed. “You gonna go after her?” he asked Sam.

Sam was already at his laptop with his phone in hand, scrolling through his contacts. He wasted no time, he hadn’t even turned to watch her leave. “No,” he replied, sharply. Dean never did understand when people needed to be left alone, but Sam did. He knew she needed some time to clear her head. “I’ve got work to do.”

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

“How much sleep did you get last night, Sammy?” Dean yawned as he opened the Impala door. Sam was in the front seat, legs sprawled, one hanging out the open passenger door while he clicked through his phone, returning emails, checking texts. He had been waiting on Dean to emerge from their room and for Liv to join them with her coffee. Dean closed the door as he settled in and turned the engine on. “You were tappin’ away at your computer when I fell asleep and you were tappin’ on your phone when I woke up.”

Sam glanced up briefly. “Few hours.” he replied. “Just enough.”

“I’ve heard that before.”

Sam ignored that last quip and hopped out of the car. A second later Liv was climbing into the back seat. She handed Dean a cup of coffee over his shoulder as Sam slammed the door shut behind him, holding his own cup. Liv wore a big smile even though she still seemed pale and there were dark circles under her eyes.

“Thanks,” Dean said shortly, eyeing her in the rearview mirror.

“Welcome,” she replied, just as short. She didn’t return his gaze.

 _Guess we’re not totally pretending nothing happened yesterday,_ Dean thought.

“So,” Dean began, “we heading to the hospital first or--?”

“No need,” Sam replied. “I hacked the hospital servers last night and did some cross referencing of new admittance from the last two days. There are three, possibly four, other victims that have checked in. We _have_ to find a cure, and fast.”

“Woa, Sammy, going super illegal on this one.”

“Well, it’s a time sensitive situation.”

“Wait,” came Liv’s voice from the back, slightly strained. “You hacked the hospital _last night?”_

“It was no big deal, it only took a few hours--”

“You told me you got sleep!” accused Dean.

“And I did. And I’m fine.” He turned back to Liv. “How did you sleep?”

Liv shrugged and nodded nervously. “Fine. I’m fine.”

“We’ve been together for five minutes and I’m already sick of the word ‘fine,’” Dean grumbled.

“I made some calls last night to see what we need to do to counter whatever this is,” Sam explained as Dean backed the Impala up and pulled out of the parking lot. “More than likely it’s a spell of some sort so we have to narrow down its origin. So we’re looking for spell books, demonic ingredients, stuff for dark magic, anything we can research and trace back to some kind of lore. We pin down the origin, we have a starting point for a remedy.”

“Those poor bastards,” Dean mused. “Checked into the hospital and nothing they do there is gonna help’em.”

“Yeah,” agreed Sam. “But we can. We need to head to the addresses Liv collected from the files at Gustava Java. Those are the best places to start looking.”

“Already in my GPS,” Liv declared. “George seemed to be the one in charge. Let’s try his house first.” The Impala changed lanes and took the first turn to their right, and they were on their way.  

Sneaking into the houses listed at the addresses for the two Gustava Java demon workers was dangerous. They were each considered a crime scene now that both men were dead. Dean heard on the police radio before he fell asleep the night before that both bodies seemed to have been dead for months, though one had been newly stabbed. They couldn’t figure it out, but nevertheless, investigations were happening all around Gustava Java and at the homes where the demons had lived. So they had to park blocks away and they had to be very careful not to be seen. And then they had to be really careful about what they touched and how they left everything once they were in the house, but only after Sam disconnected the surveillance cameras.

The job kept getting trickier and trickier which didn’t help the fact that they were working against a pretty ruthless clock. The job also kept getting trickier because it didn’t seem to matter how much coffee Liv would drink, she could not stop feeling like she needed to lie down. Two hours into their search at George’s, Liv felt like she had been hit by a bus. To her left sat a neatly stacked pile of boxes and books she was going through as she sat on the wood floor of the master bedroom closet, cross-legged. She had a system so that everything she picked up she could put right back like she found it. So far she had found nothing particularly of interest, nothing that fit the profile of what they were looking for, and she was starting to panic.

She would have liked to wonder why she was panicking. She would have liked to stay in denial, but the dread that took hold of her the night before when she could have shrugged it off as the aftermath of working the job wasn’t wearing off. It was only getting stronger the weaker and more tired she felt, the longer she went with no answer for a starting point for a cure. Which just caused more guilt because she should want this cure for those people in the hospital just as bad as she'd want it for herself.

Her heart rate sped up, her breathing became choppy, and she felt wetness in her eyes. What had she gotten herself into? What had she done? Was this her fault? Was there something she could have done differently? Her mind raced through these questions as if she didn’t already know the answers. Yes, she could have done things differently. She could have kept her mouth closed when Dean was baiting her at the cafe and not started a fight in the middle of a hunt. She could have kept her focus on the job instead of letting her emotions get the better of her.

Would they have been able to identify the demon’s presence more quickly, with more time to react, had they not been arguing? And why were they even arguing, again? What was it all for? Because she was frustrated her boyfriend’s brother may not like her? Seemed pretty stupid, she thought, now that she was probably going to die.

She shook her head to clear it and took in long deep breaths, but that just made her dizzy and it didn’t slow her heart rate. It didn’t calm her at all. Panic and guilt were going to choke her to death, right here, in the goddamn demon’s house. She kept breathing slowly in and out.

 _You’re okay, you’re just tired,_ she told herself. _You didn’t sleep well, you just need rest._

Deep breath.

She leaned to her side and laid on the hard floor, squeezing her eyes tight. The cool wood touched her cheek and she felt the shock of it jump-start her senses and cut through the haze. The panic paused for a moment and stopped raising up into her throat.

Deep breath.

She curled her knees up against her chest, lying there in the middle of the closet on the floor in the fetal position, hoping desperately neither of the Winchesters would walk in.

Deep breath.

What was she going to do if the boys had to watch her slowly die? She had to find a starting point. She had to fix this.  She _had_ to.

She opened her eyes. She stared ahead, the side of her face still against the floor. George’s clothes hung on a rack that caused the bottoms of them to just skim the tops of his shoes, lined up in pairs in Liv’s eyesight from where she lay. He had three pairs of dress shoes, and two pairs of sneakers. And deep back behind the shoes, in the crevice between the row of shoes and the bottoms of George’s shirts Liv saw a glow.

She blinked and lifted up off the ground, reaching to move the shirts aside. The glow was under the baseboard at the back of the closet. She dug her way through the clothes, setting the shoes to the side in the same system she used to keep the boxes and books in order. When there was enough room cleared she could see there actually wasn’t a baseboard behind this spot because there was a small door. The glow was light from within pouring across the threshold.

She stood, pushing through a dizzy spell, catching herself on the closet doorway as she swayed. She moved the clothes to clear a complete space. The secret door was about as wide as George had been and she wondered how he fit in there comfortably. There was no doorknob so she just pushed it and the secret door creaked open. A small rectangular room cast in the orange light of a large burning candle sitting on a tiny table was on the other side. There were books stacked all around it and a section that Liv could only describe as what she imagined the apothecary’s shop from Romeo and Juliet looked like.

“Guys!” she tried to shout, but it came out slightly strained and raspy and weak. She cleared her throat and tried again, hanging her head out into the hallway. “Hey, Sam, Dean?”

“Liv, you okay?” Sam call from somewhere in the house. “ _Dean!_ Get up here!” His voice boomed. She could hear the edge in it.

Sam appeared in the hallway, storming toward her like he expected her to be bleeding to death. He grabbed her shoulders, firm but tenderly, looking into her face like he had the night before. His hands came up to her cheeks, steadying her so he could really study her eyes.

“Are you okay? What’s wrong?”

Her hands came up to grab his on her face, apologetically. “Nothing!” she assured him. “I feel... “ she couldn’t say _‘fine’_ anymore, but it wasn’t the time to discuss that anyways. “That’s not why I called for you guys. Look.” She turned to point towards the glow of the closet and Sam’s hand fell to her shoulder.

_“Woah.”_

“What the hell is goin’ on!?” Dean shouted as he entered the room. He was breathing hard like he had run up stairs, which he probably had since he was digging through George’s basement. Sam was already climbing through the thin door at the back of the closet. “Oh, _shit.”_ Dean rushed to look into the tiny room. “Shit!”

“This is the motherload,” affirmed Sam. He sounded muffled and slightly far away. “We may even need boxes to transport this stuff back to the motel!”

Just then, Liv heard the sound of a car pulling up outside. As the boys continued to shuffle around the secret compartment, she peeked through the blinds to see the police parking next to the curb. “Guys! The police are here.”

The Winchesters poked their heads around the corner comically. _“What?”_

“Police! Here!”

The boys spilled out of the tiny room. “Goddammit, what’re we gonna do! We’ve got to get this stuff!”

“We’ll leave it for now,” Sam decided. “We can come back for it when the police have gone. Quick, put everything back!”

“Blow out the candle!” Liv instructed. “The light is how I found the room!”

Dean obeyed then closed the narrow door behind him. Sam raced down the hall to reset his and Dean’s rummaging. Liv was replacing the clothes and shoes so they looked just as she had discovered them. Then she went to restacking the boxes and books.

“C’mon!” Dean hissed. “Just put it back and--”

 _“No!”_ she hissed back, turning on him with a slightly unhinged look in her eye. “If the cops are suspicious that someone has been fucking with this spot they could find that room! And if they find it, they will confiscate everything in it and it will be locked in an evidence locker by people who don’t know what to do with it! This has to look like no one has been here if we want to come back for it!”

Without another word, Dean fell to his knees next to her and helped her finish stacking.

“They’re in.” Sam’s calm whisper startled them both. Dean jumped to his feet and grabbed Liv to pull her up. Her breathing was back to being choppy. She was pale and now beads of sweat had collected across her forehead.

The three of them crept softly down the hallway on the hard wood floor, going towards the back door, opposite of where the police had entered. They could hear the cops talking about the case and the radio feedback from their walkies. The bustle made it a little easier for the Winchesters and Liv to move through the house undetected. Sam unlatched the lock and opened the door, allowing Dean and Liv to squeeze through the “Crime Scene” tape draped across it from the outside, then Sam followed and they made a run for it across the street.

But Liv was utterly spent, she couldn’t fight her exhaustion anymore, and there was no pretending she was fine any longer. She could barely breathe as it was, let alone while running. She went down without warning, without even a second to consider calling out for help, but like he was waiting for her to fall, Sam caught her and scooped her effortlessly into his arms. He carried her all the way back to the Impala before she came-to again.

“I- can…” she muttered. “I can walk…”

“No, Livvy,” he whispered as he laid her in the back seat. “You can’t.”

 


	5. Chapter 5

“Goddammit!”

Dean paced around Liv’s motel room and every five minutes or so he’d let a _‘goddammit’_ or a _‘son of a bitch’_ loose, while Sam was talking on his phone. Liv laid in her bed, eyes watering, completely wiped of all energy. She felt like she could physically do absolutely nothing. She was rendered completely useless.

“Son of a bitch!”

“Dean, do you mind?” Sam scolded, indicating the phone in his hand. Dean shrugged dramatically in return and went back to pacing.

“Yes, we’ll have it all by the end of the day, hopefully,” Sam spoke into his phone. “Yes ma’am, a mist. About twenty-two hours ago?” He looked over at Liv for confirmation. She nodded. It was just about that time the day before that the demon had infected her. How many hours did she have left? “You can do that? Would you mind? Okay, sure, yeah. One sec.” Sam handed Liv the phone. “She wants to talk to you.”

Liv struggled to sit up against her pillow. “Who is it? What’s her name?”

“Missouri Moseley.”

“Hello?” Liv croaked. Nothing. Liv pulled the phone away to make sure she was still connected. They were. She pulled the phone back to her hear. “Miss Moseley? Hello?”

 _“Hush, honey,”_ she heard on the other side of the phone. _“I can’t read you when you talk like that.”_

“Oh. Sorry…”

_“Hush, now.”_

Liv held the phone to her ear awkwardly as the boys watched. Sam’s brow was knit up with concern while Dean’s look was something like confusion mixed with impatient fury. Liv held the phone silently for exactly three more minutes before anyone made another sound (it was Dean, who let loose another _“goddammit”_ ).

 _“Sorry for that,”_ Missouri said finally. _“It always works better on the phone the less we talk beforehand.”_

“That… that’s okay,” Liv stuttered. “So what did we just do?”

_“He didn’t tell you he was in contact with me, did he?”_

“No--”

 _“That boy…”_ Missouri sounded amused.

“To be fair, I haven’t really been willing to discuss the situation until … recently.”

_“I know, sugar. But that’s not gonna get you well.”_

“Do you know what is?”

_“No, but I’m gonna try to help those boys figure it out.”_

“Who are you?”

_“I’m an old friend of the family. And I have special talents, I can read people.”_

“Like a psychic.”

_“Exactly like that.”_

“What did you read from me before?”

 _“What you’re afraid of. Sam wants to know what to expect in the coming days.”_ Liv’s face rumpled up in distress. _“It’s okay, honey. You’re in good hands. And you’re not a burden, I know that’s what you think. And you’re angry at yourself for letting this happen, but that’s not what happened. You think it makes you weak. You think it’s a reflection of your skills, that if you were better, if you hadn’t been distracted, this wouldn’t have happened.”_ Tears were falling down Liv’s face. _“But his isn’t your fault. You understand?”_

“Yes,” Liv choked out.

_“I can’t see the future, I don’t have all the answers, but I do know you’re going to have to be strong the next few days. I’ll be in touch. I’ll do all I can to help.”_

“Thank you, Miss... Moseley.” Liv sniffed and Sam handed her a tissue.

_“It’s Missouri. Now hand me back to your man.”_

Liv obeyed without even thinking to say goodbye.

“Hello,” Sam spoke into the phone. “Thanks a lot. Yeah, definitely. Yes ma’m.” Sam nodded along as he listened to Missouri go on for a few minutes longer, his eyes watching over Liv absent-mindedly. “You don’t know how much I appreciate your help. Yes, talk soon. Bye.”

“Does she know how to cure it?” Dean blurted out as Sam pocketed his cell.

Sam’s face contorted into an exasperated expression. “No, Dean, it’s like I said. We need to find the spell’s origin. Then we can go from there.”

“But that’s the same exact info we’ve been going off of already!” Dean scoffed. “What good was calling her if that’s all--”

“She’s the reason I had a place to start in the first place!” Sam shouted, cutting Dean off. “I called her last night. I told her everything I knew based on my research and what you two said happened to Liv. She got me some numbers of people closer by than her to contact and told me it sounded like a spell. She’s been reading up today waiting to hear back from me.”

Dean was slightly stunned. Sammy had done a ridiculous amount of legwork in just the last day and Dean hadn’t even realized. Still, it would have been a lot easier if Moseley had just had the answer. What good is being a psychic if you don’t know shit?

He looked Liv over. The way she seemed to be struggling to breathe regularly made his stomach turn and the hair around her face was clumped up in sweat. She was getting paler by the minute and now with tears on her face, she looked even more pitiful.

“Goddammit!” he shouted again.

“Dean, seriously,” Sam pleaded.

“Shouldn’t we take her to the hospital? Or something?”

“You said it yourself,” Liv wheezed. “They can’t do anything for me there. This isn’t something a doctor can fix.”

Dean rounded on her, his eyebrows upturned. “But wouldn’t you feel better there?”

She shook her head. “At least here I can maybe do some research and help. And once you guys find the counter curse or whatever is going to fix me, I’ll be right down the hall. Not across town.”

He stared at her and for a second and Liv thought Dean’s eyes were welling up, but instead he exploded once again. “This is such a clusterfuck, Sammy! There’s a countdown but we’re stuck. Those goddamn cops --that goddamn room-- we could be doin’ something but we’re just stuck!”

“Well, yelling about it isn’t going to change anything,” Sam growled.

“I can’t just sit here and wait around!”

Sam’s jaw clenched along with both his fists. He drew in a breath. No one wanted to sit around and do nothing less than Sam. “In a few hours we’ll go back and get that shit out of that closet,” he said through clenched teeth. “Until then, let’s not lose our heads.”

“I’m not losin’ my head! But I’m not sitting around here either.” And with that, Dean stormed out and was gone.

Liv’s hand came up and covered her face. She sat like that until she felt Sam hovering over her at the side of the bed, his hand resting on her back. “I’m so sorry, Sam,” she whimpered through her hands. He grabbed her hand away from her face and squatted next to the bed so he was eye level.

“Don’t do that,” he said. “It’s not your fault. Everything is going to be okay.”

She nodded feebly.

“Will you please tell me how you’re actually feeling now?” he pleaded with a tiny smile. “Any information about this thing could help us.”

“Yes, I’m sorry I was so stubborn.”

“Hey, we’ve all been there.”

“I feel feverish, like I’m cold and warm at the same time. I feel light headed, weak, I keep getting dizzy. And I feel scared. Just, in the pit of my stomach, constant terror. But I can’t decide if it’s just the fear of knowing I’m sick or part of the infection. I .. I can’t separate it anymore.”

Sam looked so sad. “Could you separate it before?”

“I don’t know, I think so? But it feels like the fear is growing stronger.”

He nodded and stood. “I’m going to get my laptop,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

“Sam, what are you going to find that you haven’t already searched for?”

He hesitated. “I just want to add this to the notes I’ve already collected about the sickness.” Liv shook her head because she didn’t believe that’s all he was going to do and, if Sam was being honest with himself, he didn’t expect her to believe it. “I’ll just go get it and bring it back in here. It’ll make me feel better if I can get to it in case I think of something useful.”

He was back within seconds, setting up his powercord next to the table by the window.

“There’s a plug by the alarm clock. Come sit with me,” Liv suggested. If all the illness was allowing her to do was lay around, the least she could do was lay near Sam. And if Sam wasn’t going to rest for even a moment, the least he could do was let her watch him research. “I’m a small person, there’s room.”

Sam set up his laptop and settled in on the bed next to Liv. Liv felt the mattress shift under his weight and let herself roll a little towards him. She rested her cheek against his arm as he typed things into his notes and then into search bars and clicked through his browser history to find passages to reread. There were words in latin, which she could almost mostly decipher, but then there were other languages she wasn’t familiar with that he was also typing and reading and she wondered what it all meant. And she wondered if she would understand it better if she wasn’t sick with her brain swimming. And she wondered how Sam fit all the things he knew in his brain. And with hardly any sleep, at that. There is no way he slept the night before if he hacked the hospital server, then combed through the patients lists, and made calls across the country, and did research while taking notes. There is no way.

“Sam,” Liv whispered.

“Yeah.”

“Did you sleep last night?”

He stopped typing.

She leaned up on her elbow so she could look at him. _Oh,_ she thought when she realized she was shaking. She ignored it but Sam could not. “You’re not going to be able to keep going at this pace,” she said.

“I’m fine,” he insisted.

“No, neither of us are, and this is probably the last pocket of time I’ll be semi-okay before this shit gets really bad--”

“We’re going to figure this out--”

“--and Dean said it, we’re stuck for now. Why don’t you just rest for a second? While you can?”

Sam seemed to be weighing out the practicality of resting against the practicality of rereading and re-searching things he’d already read and searched for with just one tid-bit of new info in mind. It shouldn’t be such a hard decision, but for Sam it was, because sleep would be self care, but working would be taking care of Liv and taking care of the victims still in the hospital. Every single one of them had less time than Liv did. But then, if he ran himself ragged too early, he’d be of no use to any of them. Sleep had never come easily to Sam and he was well-aware that if he laid down, his mind would race and the very thoughts that convinced him to try to sleep would circulate back into reasons why he shouldn’t.

“Sam,” Liv whispered. “I feel myself getting foggier by the hour. Just… can you lay with me for a little bit? While I can still process it.”

He snapped his laptop shut without another thought and set it aside, pulling her in. She nestled into his chest and felt herself breathe a little easier. Sam kissed the top of her forehead then settled against the pillows tucked underneath him against the headboard. “We’re going to figure this out,” he said again.

“I know.”

 --

Two hours later, Liv shot straight up out of bed in a panic, wrenching herself away from Sam. She was shaking and breathing heavily. Sam, startled out of his daze, put his hands on her shoulders.

“Liv, what is it?” he asked. “What do you feel?”

She shook her head. She wasn’t sure. All she knew was she felt a whole new wave of fear and it was starting to physically hurt. The terror was actually physically grating under her skin. She could almost feel it scratching at her from the inside. Her eyes were wide with terror as she tried to express what she was feeling but nothing came out. She tore the sheets off of her and climbed off the bed. She stood holding her stomach as though she thought she might explode. Sam crawled to the edge of the bed, watching her in his own fear.

“Liv?” She swayed on her feet, so he hopped up and steadied her.

“It hurts,” she whispered. “Everything. Everywhere.”

Sam was searching her terrified face, trying to fully understand what she meant so he could add it to the data they had already collected. He couldn’t look away from her. He had never seen her so pale, so gaunt, and so scared before. Sweat began to collect across her forehead again, she was still shaking, her voice was a pitch he’d never heard, and her eyes were wide, red, and glassy. The longer he took in the trembling mess that was Liv, the heavier the burden weighing on his chest became.

She reached out to him and placed a hand on his arm that still gripped her to keep her upright. “It’s inside,” she whispered, focusing on him for the first time since she woke. “It’s in me, I can _feel_ it.”

Sam’s eyes widened. Liv pushed away from him and stumbled towards the bathroom where she retched into the toilet. Sam grabbed a bottle of water from the minibar and a rag. Nothing was going to make this easier, but he could still try regular remedies. Supernatural illness or not, she’d still need to wipe her face and stay hydrated. He sat both on the floor in arm’s reach of her, then sat down, himself. His legs were tangled up as he tried to fit there next to her in the tiny motel bathroom.

She tilted her head to see him, her forehead resting against her arm draped over the edge of the bowl. A single tear fell down her cheek.

“Guess throwing up isn’t going to make the nausea go away like it normally would,” Liv muttered, panting.

Sam shook his head, sadly. “Not likely.”

“Awesome.” She turned away from him, continuing to rest her forehead on her arm.

“You want to.. move back into the room?”

“No,” she answered, another tear falling down the tip of her nose. “If this is the next stage…” she paused, catching her breath, “I better just stay put…”

Sam grabbed some extra pillows from the bed and some sheets and a blanket. He helped her concoct a makeshift pallet over the bathroom rug. Not ideal, kind of gross, but it was better than nothing. It wasn’t long before she was back at it, retching into the bowl. When she was done she threw herself away from the toilet in frustration. A sob escaped her lips.

“Sam,” she bleated. “Could you not watch this?”

He nodded. “Sure.” His voice shook. “I’ll just be in here. If you need me.” He stood in the doorway for a second longer than he meant to, looking on in pity, wishing there was something he could do, but then he tore himself away. Instead of going straight for his laptop, however, he paused, hijacked in the middle of the motel room as he heard Liv begin retching again. Throwing up was terrible, no one enjoyed it, but it wasn’t something that people tended to fear would kill them. He wondered what made this something Liv considered unbearable enough to manifest in this demonic infection.

“It’s a puzzle!” came a familiar, sardonic voice. “Too bad she’s so busy puking. Otherwise you could actually ask her for the answer. Add a bit more to your handy-dandy notebook!” Sam ignored him, as he usually did, pressing down on a very specific spot on his right hand. He didn’t have time for this. “Haha, Sam! Look at the pair of you. What a mess. At least with the girl, there’s the possibility of a cure, though. There’s no getting rid of me.” Sam dug his fingernail into his own skin as he continued to press down hard on his hand. Lucifer blinked in and out of existence, then with a pouty face, he disappeared altogether.

\--

Dean stormed in just like he had stormed out, without warning and with a lot of noise. If Liv hadn’t been in the middle of throwing up, it would have probably really freaked her out.

“Well, I went to Timmy-the-barista’s house,” he declared as he slammed the door behind him. Noticing Liv on the bathroom floor put a grossed out, yet concerned expression on his face. Sam met Dean with a finger over his mouth, shushing him. “Dude, what’s going on now?”

“She’s been throwing up for about three hours now,” Sam replied in a hushed tone.

“Yeesh, brutal.”

“You’ve been gone all afternoon.”

“I told you I couldn’t sit around here.”

“Dean--”

“Look, I got shit done. I swept all of Tim’s house, there’s not a thing there. It’s all in that closet at the big guy’s house.”

“Did the police ever come--”

“No, I didn’t see any trace that the cops had already been there. They’ll probably be combing over Tim’s stuff tomorrow. Now we know all we need is at George’s place. The police weren’t there when I drove back by. We could go right now and get it.”

Sam puffed out a sigh of relief and nodded. “Okay,” he conceded. “Let’s do it.”

Sam grabbed his wallet, his cell, and Liv’s cell, then peeked into the bathroom. Liv was propped up against the bathtub, head lolling to one side as though she was falling asleep. He didn't want to wake her but he did anyways. “Livvy,” he crooned, squatting beside her. She started out of sleep. Her breaths erupted out of her violently. It broke his heart. “Hey, hey, it’s okay. Liv, focus on me.” She obeyed and the terror-fog, as they had started calling it, subsided as her eyes zoned in on Sam, on reality. “Dean’s back, he thinks we need to go now to get that stuff from the room you found. I have to go, but we’ll be back as soon as possible. Okay?”

She nodded fervently like she thought it was a really good idea that he go. “I’ll be here,” she croaked. Humor sounded strange draped in her raspy, weak voice.

“I’m leaving your cell up here on the counter, next to the sink. Call if you need us.”

She nodded again. He turned to follow Dean.

“Let’s just pray the police didn’t find that room,” Dean griped as he opened the door.

“Pray?” Sam scorned.

“Or whatever… you know what I mean--”


	6. Chapter 6

“So she hasn’t thrown up in a few hours?” Dean asked Sam. It was the next morning and they were in their room getting ready for the day, though Sam had spent the night in Liv’s in case she needed anything. He had slept only a few hours, if that.

“Yeah, she finally settled down around 4 A.M.,” Sam responded. “I don’t know what to think of it, though. All that means is the next stage of the sickness is on its way, and they only get worse.” Bitterness hung in his tone. “I don’t want her to keep enduring what she was going through last night but…”

“Well, we’ll just have to find the cure today then.”

Sam nodded, half-heartedly. “She’s asleep now. I don’t have the heart to wake her, but we don’t have time to waste.”

“You don’t need to ask her if you can take her car. I’m sure she wouldn’t care--”

“It’s not that. I don’t want to leave then her wake in a panic and not know where we are.”

Sam finished packing his bags full of the stuff they had collected from George’s house the night before: strange bottles and vials of unsavory ingredients, books with weird inscriptions, candles and alters with odd symbols etched onto them. Missouri had instructed them to meet at least three of her contacts to look the stuff over. She said they couldn’t afford to chase the wrong lead, so a second and third opinion was crucial. Sam was in charge of meeting with the spell experts while Dean was going to settle, once and for all, that George and Tim were the only two demons involved. He was going to do some questioning at the hospital and check in on the current victims being treated there. The plan was to meet back at the motel later that evening and go through all of the data Sam would hopefully acquire from Missouri’s people. By the next day, they should have a cure

“Decide what you’re gonna do then, brother. It’s go time.”

Sam threw his bag over his shoulder and headed down the hall towards Liv’s room.. He was surprised to find that she was awake and sitting up against her pillow with her laptop.

“Hey!” Sam couldn’t hide his relief at seeing her with a bit or energy.

“Hey,” she returned softly, voice raw from being sick all night.

“I didn’t expect you to be awake.”

“Just barely.”

“Dean and I have to go, we’ve got a lot of work to do, but I’ll have my phone--”

“I wish I could go with you guys.”

“You’d only slow us down, O,” came Dean’s voice from against the door. Sam shot him a glare. “I meant it to comfort her!” he responded, defensively.

“I know I’ll slow you down,” she replied. “But here I’ll be just…”--her voice broke--“it feels like I’m just waiting around to die.”

Sam shook his head and pulled her into a hug. “You’re not going to die,” he breathed into her hair, rubbing her back. He rocked her just a little as she clung to him. “You call me if anything happens.” He felt her nod under his chin, and then he let her go and made for the door. She watched him glare down Dean as he passed his brother and she watched Dean glare right back. Then they were gone. It was just barely 7 o’clock in the morning so the sun was just peeking through the blinds. Liv tried to keep her breathing normal, but it was shallow and uneven regardless. She wasn’t looking forward to finding out what the next stage of this illness was, but she knew it was coming, ready or not.

\--

“I haven’t seen anything like this in possibly… half a century?” The first person Sam stopped off to meet was a warlock Missouri knew pretty well called Gaius. It felt weird to Sam, hanging around this guy, not investigating the witchcraft he performed, but Sam trusted Missouri and he didn’t have time to wonder about how Gaius chose to use his power. He just needed him to help him figure out what they were looking at so they could end all of this. “And you say it was cast by a mist?” Gaius asked, turning another page of the spell book. The words in it were basically unreadable to Sam. He had tried to decipher them, but it was a language he was unfamiliar with.

“Yes,” he replied. “Can you read this book?”

“Only just,” Gaius sighed. “It’s an alphabet so old, I’ve forgotten how to read some of it. No one writes in this form anymore.” He turned another page.

“Do you think you could flip through here and pin-point any spells you think sound close to what we’ve described?”

“I can. It shouldn’t be too difficult to narrow down, especially if these are all the stock they had.” Gaius pointed at the artifacts from George’s house strewn all across the dining room table.

“Thanks,” Sam replied, awkwardly. “And if it’s not in that book, maybe you could help me find it in one of these?” He pulled out another bag that had about eight other spell books in the same unreadable script. Gaius’ dark eyes widened.

“I do have things to do, ya know?” Sam looked slightly desperate for just a second, but before he could say _‘I understand,’_ Gaius was taking the bag of books from Sam’s hands. “Now, now,” Gaius muttered. “There’s no need for those ridiculous, glassy, puppy-dog eyes.”

Sam wasn’t sure what Gaius was referring to, but he was glad it convinced him to help all the same.

\--

“Yeah, I’m heading to the next one right now. I should be there by 1. I just finished with this Gaius guy, weird dude. Tall. Almost as tall as me.” Sam pulled out onto the winding back roads that lead him to Gaius’ house.

_“He give us anything good?”_

“Lots of possible spells. He wasn’t too familiar with how to read those books, but he did his best. Hoping the next one will help us narrow it down further.”

_“Well, so far I’ve got no demonic activity at this hospital, but bad news, Sammy.”_

“What?”

_“One of the victims died this morning.”_

“Dammit.” Sam’s heart sank. “Do you know what they ruled cause of death?”

_“Rabies.”_

“Jesus!”

_“This thing is nasty.”_

“Hold on Dean, Liv is calling.” Sam pulled the phone away to switch over. “ --Hello?”

 _“Sam!”_ He barely recognized her voice.

“Livvy, what’s wrong?”

All he heard were wheezes and a few hacking coughs.

“Liv! Are you there?”

 _“Sam,”_ she wept, then another cough to follow. _“I’m going to die. I’m going to die….”_

“Livvy, listen, you’re not--”

_“...in this motel. I’m going to die alone…”_

“I’m coming back, hold tight. I’m coming back right now.”

\--

Sam bursted into Liv’s room to find her on her lying on her stomach on the bed and there was blood pretty much all around her. At first he wasn’t sure what he was looking at. He wasn’t expecting to come into a bloody scene, but blood there was. Lots of it.

“Oh god,” Sam muttered.

“Wow, I didn’t even have to come up with this for you, Sam! This is all real!”

Sam ignored Lucifer again, like always, racing to the bed. There was blood smeared across Liv’s face, there was blood on her hands and all down her arms, there was blood on her t-shirt and blood on the sheets beneath her, and strewn all on the bed and the floor around her were tons of bloody tissues.

He grabbed her up and she started out of sleep or unconsciousness, he wasn’t sure which, and immediately started coughing. Blood flew from her mouth as she desperately scrambled for something to cover her mouth with. Sam tried to run to the bathroom to get her a towel but she wouldn’t let him loose. She clung to him and desperately tried to drag him back towards the bed. He collapsed next to her and let her fall sobbing into his lap. Every third cry was pair with a bloody cough. He was too dumbfounded to know what to say, so instead of talking he just smoothed her hair away from her face and let her cry against his chest.

“I can’t do this, I can’t do this,” she cried. “I can’t. I can’t.” He shushed her softly, trying to soothe her. “Oh god,” she whimpered. “Oh god, Sam, it’s just like when my mom was sick.”

Dawning struck him as he remembered the first time they had met. She told him about her mother who got cancer when Liv was young. He had never asked more about it. At the time it had seemed too personal, but now he felt like the worst person alive for never going back to that subject.

With Liv still clinging to him, Sam whipped out his phone and dialed Dean.

_“Dude, what happened to you?”_

“I’m back at the motel and--”

_“What?”_

“Liv is worse than ever.”

_“We’re supposed to be double teamin’ this case, Sam!”_

“I can’t leave her like this!” His voice cracked as he raised it. “Dean, please. I can’t-- I can’t leave her.”

He heard Dean sigh. _“Fine, I’m on my way there now.”_

The hospital wasn’t far from where they were staying so it only took Dean a few minutes to return, and when he did, the scene he encountered did not help his frustration. Sam said things were bad, but Dean didn’t expect a bloodbath any more than Sam had.  When Dean walked in, Sam had still not thought to move out from under the coughing Liv, so every spot of blood Sam had been horrified by when he entered was still there to equally horrify Dean.

“Oh my God, Sammy! She’s, I mean there’s-- there’s fucking blood everywhere!”

Liv turned over a bit to see Dean, blood still staining her face.

“Holy shit, what the fuck is going on?”

Liv coughed again into another tissue.

“Oh God, here!” Dean grabbed a towel from the bathroom and handed it to her.

“Thanks,” she sniffed, and wiped her face, hands, and arms, but then coughed again directly into the towel and broke down crying once more.

“I need you to take the bags and go see Missouri’s other two contacts,” Sam said.

“What?” Dean challenged.

“Dean, you heard me. Please, I cannot leave her like this.”

“We split the stuff up because we’re on a goddamn ticking clock and now you wanna throw all the work load onto me?”

“I don’t _want_ to, Dean! But that’s how things have shaken out today.”

Dean rubbed both hands over his face, a sign of true fury and frustration. His eyes fell on Liv and she watched it become too much for him. “Goddammit!” he roared.  “We’re losin’ this one! We’re losin’ this race!” He began to pace in front of the bed. “I just _had_ to make that joke, you just _had_ to come with me to that cafe. Well, you sure showed me.” Liv pushed away from Sam and tried to sit up on her own. She struggled to make a reply but before she could hack through her cough to get to her words Dean was already on his next venomous tirade. “You had to start an argument! You just _had_ to light into me at that exact moment, didn’t you? Great fucking timing. Now look at us.”

Sam flew off the bed and stood inches from his brother’s face. His expression, his posture, and the tone in his voice was all very calm and very dangerous.

“Back. _Off._ ” he warned with terrifying control.

For a second Liv wasn’t sure what was going to happened next, but relief washed over her when Dean took a step back and deep breath and seemed to reel himself in, clenching his jaw.

“Where are the bags?” Dean asked.

Sam pointed to the chair by the computer desk. Dean grabbed them without another word and left.

“I told you,” wheezed Liv. “I told you he hated me.”

Sam looked at her over his shoulder. “He doesn’t hate you.”

“He does!” She was becoming hysterical. “He hates me because I came around and took you away. He never wanted me around, since the beginning! But now I’m going to die and you’re never going to forgive each other and I’ve ruined everything!”

“Liv, don’t do this,” he said, coming in close to her to coax her down. “Focus on me. It’s the fog, it’ll pass.”

Her brows pulled together helplessly as she searched his face for an answer to how she was feeling, for the clarity of reality, for the relief from the terror that came the last time he tried this trick, but it didn’t come. The terror-fog was here to stay, it seemed.

Sam sighed and looked her over, brushing a clump of hair away from her face. She looked terrifying, covered in blood, pale as a ghost with tears rolling down her face, sitting in piles of what looked like bloody rags. She could be a vengeful spirit from another of their jobs. “Liv, let’s get you cleaned up.”

He helped her to the bathroom where she washed her face and hands and changed her shirt in between coughing. She stared at herself in the mirror like she couldn’t believe what she saw. It had been three days but she almost looked like a completely different person. She stumbled out of the bathroom and found Sam changing her sheets. He had thrown all the bloody tissues away and brought her the Kleenex boxes from his and Dean’s room and set them on her bedside table. Tears started falling down her face again and she wasn’t even sure why. She was exhausted, her entire body hurt, she was probably going to die in the next two days, but the most wonderful person on earth was cleaning up after her and making her bed usable again.

As Sam tucked the last corner of the new sheets in, Liv crawled back onto the bed with a new tissue in hand. “What would I do without you?” she said.

Sam settled in next to her, his expression unreadable. “Without me?” he asked. “You probably wouldn’t be in this mess.”

“Don’t say that.” She grabbed his arm. She needed to touch him. “Don’t say that,” she repeated.

He only shook his head in return.

\--

Dean returned hours later, exhausted, frustrated, and starving. Sam met him at the door. He took the bags of spellbooks and artifacts from him and stared at him anxiously, waiting for a report. “We got a lot of shit to go through and not a lot of time to do it in,” Dean said. “But I met with the other two people. They narrowed things down as much as possible.”

Sam nodded. He had hoped for more, that maybe one of the contacts recognized something definitive. But this was a start. He just wished it wasn’t three days late.

“Also, another one of the victims in the hospital died while I was working.”

Sam could only shake his head. He felt like the wind had been knocked out of him

“How’s--?” Dean inclined his head towards Liv over Sam’s shoulder.

“Not good,” Sam replied in low voice, like he didn't want her to hear. “She asked me if we could take her to be with her grandpa.”

“What, why?”

“I don’t want to die in a motel room in the middle of nowhere,” she cried. “I want to be with my family.”

“No,” Dean looked slightly affronted. “No! You’re not gonna die!”

She covered her face with her hands and the tears came again. Dean’s furious eyes landed back on Sam

“It’s nearly a day’s drive--” Sam continued.

“Wait, you actually _considered_ this?”

Sam dropped his eyes and brought his hand up to his mouth, shaking his head. “I told her we couldn’t do it even if we wanted to,” Sam continued, voice shaking. “We are trying to get to this cure for the victims in the hospital, too. We can’t leave town until we find it.”

Liv’s sobbing intensified. Sam looked as though he might start crying himself.

“Look,” Dean commanded, stepping past Sam and towards the bed. “You are not gonna die. We have all we need right here to figure this out. We are gonna beat this!” He hesitated, looking from Sam to Liv and back like he was expecting them to rally. “For Christ’s sake, Sam's died, I’ve died, but Liv, _you_ are not dyin’. We need one person with us who’s never gone beyond the goddamn veil.”

 


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Song pairing** \- [Your Mess Is Mine](https://open.spotify.com/track/7BVwi9cIzSc6tpyxsp47vJ) by Vance Joy

Neither Sam nor Dean slept that night. They poured over note after note in those spellbooks until they couldn’t see straight. Throughout the night Liv had developed these micro-nightmares where she would fall asleep for just a bit and wake up shrieking. The bloody coughing had stopped, but the next stage seemed to be this. Or maybe it was just what happened to a person who was so horribly sleep deprived while enduring some of her greatest emotional and physical fears, the Winchesters weren’t sure. But even so, Liv’s hellacious pattern of waking from a nightmare in hysterics kept Sam distracted most of the night, leaving the majority of the studying to Dean.

As the sun started coming through the blinds, signifying it was morning, Dean stood up, rubbed his temples, and decided he deserved a ten minute break at the very least.

“I’m gonna go get coffee,” he suggested, voice much lower than usual. “You want anything?”

“No,” Sam replied. “But I probably should have some coffee anyway.”

“You know, she hasn’t eaten in like a day. I know she couldn’t keep anything down before, then there was the coughing, but you think she’d want to try to eat something now?”

They heard Liv wheeze a bit from the bed, a dry cough sounded, and then they heard a little chuckle. “Don’t you guys… know how this works… yet?” she struggled to say. “It’s gonna be fine... I won’t starve. That’s never been a fear of mine.”  

The boys exchanged disturbed glances.

“I’m getting her a goddamn donut.” And with that Dean sped out the door.

“I can feel it…” Liv breathed, moving her hand back and forth over her ribcage. “I can feel it growing…”

“What do you mean?” Sam asked, coming to her bedside.

“The tumor,” she said simply.

Sam looked stricken.

“I knew it… was coming,” she continued, a tear falling out the side of her eye and making its way into her hair. “This probably sounds strange, but I always thought that must be the worst thing... to feel something in your body that you didn’t ask for… that you didn’t give permission to be there... knowing it is only there to hurt you. And all you can do is... hope it goes away.”

“No, that isn’t strange,” he assured her. “I can understand that.”

“I used to have ...nightmares after Mom died, when I was a kid. I had watched her get sick, the vomiting, losing her hair… it was all pretty terrifying for me, I was pretty young. Grandpa… he’d come wake me out of these awful dreams.... He said I always said the same thing when I woke up from them: _‘I feel it in my chest.’”_

Sam grabbed her hand. She squeezed it back.

“It always felt so real,” she whispered. “... but the feeling would go away after a while… Grandpa would always make it go away ...and I could go back to sleep. But this time--” She struggled to take in a deep breath. Sam could almost hear the obstruction in her lungs. “I feel it in my chest.”

Sam brought her hand up to his mouth and he kissed it over and over. Liv’s face turned to anguish.

“Do you think…” --her loose hand still clutched at her ribcage-- “Do you think this is what she felt? Before she died? Could she feel what was killing her?”

Sam had no answer.

Liv wept.

\-- 

When Dean returned with breakfast, Sam met him at the door again, face screwed up in despair. It almost caused Dean to drop everything he was carrying.

“Sammy, what happened? Is she--?”

“She’s got one more day, tops,” Sam whispered.

Dean blinked like hearing it out loud physically slapped him in the face. “I know, just about...”

There were tears in Sam’s eyes. “Should we have just taken her to her grandfather?”

He sat the food and coffees down. “What?”

“Dean, we kept her here away from her only family so we could find a way to save her but now--”

“We’re gonna save her, Sammy--”

“--what if she dies anyway? She won’t get to see him again.”

“Yes she will!” he hissed. “She is not going to die!” Dean’s unbearable frustration and helplessness was welling up, but Sam’s wilting expression snapped him into protective brother mode. “We’ll figure this out. Look at me, look at me, Sammy,” he put his hands on his brother’s shoulders. “Taking her home would have been signing her death certificate. We made the right call. We still have time. I won’t let her die. C’mon.”

Sam nodded, though he was shaking just a bit and Dean wasn’t sure how long this resolve would last. He sighed. Sammy was probably useless for research at this point, he was too close to this, and there was no point in pretending he wasn’t constantly distracted by any movement and sound Liv made. And why shouldn’t he be? It was an awful thing to watch, Dean could barely look at her, himself. He wasn’t sure how Sam was still going, to be honest. And Dean’d be lying if he tried to say  Liv’s degeneration wasn’t affecting him as well.

“I’m taking the research to our room down the hall,” he said. “You stay here with Liv. If I need you for anything, I’ll call.”

“Dean, no!”

“I’m not askin’. She needs you, and you need to watch her. Your head is split every time you look at these books, that’s not doing her or those people in the hospital any good.”

Guilt started to creep into Sam’s expression. _No, no, that’s not what I meant to do!_ Dean thought. _How do I …?_

“She’s splitting my focus, too, Sammy,” he said, trying to better explain his intention. “I think we’ll do much better if we divide the load, like we tried to do yesterday. I got this. You laid everything out from the start. I just have to follow through. You? You have the hard part.”

Sam nodded, conceding. Dean wasn’t wrong about his focus, but Sam didn’t like the idea of not following the progress they were making. And this was the home stretch. If they were going to find a cure, it was now or never.

Once Dean was cleared out of the room Sam immediately felt useless. He knew he couldn’t leave Liv and he knew Dean would focus better without constant interruptions. This was the right call, but he couldn’t do anything to fix Liv by sitting next to her, and it crushed down on him like a boulder.

“I’ve heard this song before. It plays in your head all the time! Poor Sam can never really save the ones he loves, though he sure does cause them a lot of pain.”

This time Lucifer’s laughter made Sam physically react. He was weak, he was tired, he had been worn down, and it was getting harder to banish the visions. Sam gnashed his teeth as he pressed down on his right hand, but the laughter continued until a sound broke it and he was snapped back to the harsh reality of the dank motel room. Liv wheezed and coughed, then said something too quietly for Sam to hear at first. She kept on talking even before Sam settled in the spot next to her on the bed to listen.

“... going beyond the veil? Like in Harry Potter?”

“What are you saying, Livvy?”

Liv rolled over onto her side and draped her arm lifelessly across his stomach in a half-hearted embrace. “Dean said… you both died. What’s it like? Do you remember?”

Sam considered this question for a second and decided to go with the easy answer. “I don’t remember. But I bet it’s like falling asleep.”

Liv was quiet as she processed this. She could hear the lie in his voice, in fact she was pretty sure that was a Sirius Black line from _The Deathly Hallows,_ but she loved him for it because there was no good answer for what she asked him. She couldn’t help but ask, though. She was terrified and in pain and soon she’d be gone. There was no reason to hold back any longer. And with that in mind, other things slipped out, too, because who knew if the last stage of this ordeal was her going mute so she couldn’t say all the things she wanted to say. Things she probably wouldn’t have confessed in a million years, if she had had a million years, and not just a day.

She struggled to pull herself up to her elbow so she could look into his face, but he couldn’t allow her to struggle any more, not when he could finally give her his full attention. He scooped her up and cradled her against his chest.

“You’re gonna blame yourself aren’t you, Sam?” she whimpered. “Aren’t you?”

She knew by his expression that he was working towards saying _‘No, of course not,’_ and it would be another sweet lie to spare her pain and to allow her to die thinking he was going to be okay. But she knew better, and he should know that she did.

“You can’t,” she pleaded, pulling herself up and wrapping her arms around his neck as tightly as her waning strength would allow. “You can’t do that. Sam,” --he heard her breath catch in her throat as she spoke against his ear. “Please don’t do that, I don’t want to die and just be ...another reason you hate yourself.” She was crying again. He held her so tight he was afraid he might break her. Tears trickled down his face. “ _Please_ ,” she begged.

And if was up to him, he’d grant her that wish without a second thought, but he knew it wasn’t, that he couldn’t control the guilt that ripped him apart for everything he’d ever touched and destroyed. It was inevitable, he knew it, and so did she.  

“I was gonna fix you, Sam,” she said in a whisper. “I was gonna... convince you that you’re wonderful.” Her grip on him slackened as she exhausted her strength. She fell back to letting Sam cradle her and looked up into his face. “I’ve just ruined everything instead. You’ll never believe me now….” Her voice trailed off.

“She’s right you know.” Lucifer’s sardonic voice appeared once again. Sam jumped a little in his sleep deprivation, but he refused to turn to look at him. “Her death is going to close the door on that for good.” He sat at the table across the room and rested his head on his hand like he was daydreaming. “It’s funny Sam, my little workers set this up so the victim would physically die of something she’s most afraid of, but symbolically, her death is going to achieve her greatest emotional fear, too: that she breaks you further. Ironic really. Bonus for those demons, bet they didn’t wager they’d achieve that.” He chuckled. “You’re a literary guy, this irony can’t be lost on you. You have to appreciate the poetry in that.”

He turned his attention solely to Liv and did all he could to focus on only her. She was muttering so he focused and he listened only to her voice, her pitiful raspy voice. Lucifier protested with a joke or two, but before long all Sam heard was his name repeated over and over.

“Sam… my Sam... ” Tears spilled from Liv’s eyes. She didn’t blink them away. She didn’t seem to even notice them anymore. And she kept saying his name and he couldn’t understand why. “Sam, my favorite... you’re beautiful Sam, if I say it enough will you remember it when I’m gone?” He closed his eyes and wondered if he would remember what it was like to hear someone call him beautiful and value him this way. He didn’t know if he would remember, his guilt was sure to overpower his memory, because he didn’t think he deserved this kind of love. Look what it had brought her. But he hoped he could, if that’s what Liv wanted him to do.

“I always wanted to bring you home ...so you can meet Grandpa,” she babbled on, her eyes falling closed like she was imagining it. “He’d want to take you to church and show you off. He’d be so proud ...that I found a nice man who is so handsome, even though you have long hair…” She took in a deep breath causing another dry cough. She struggled but there was a slight curl to her lips as she went on, like thinking of this made her happy. “He’d say you have long hair like a hippy, but he’d love you... because you’d be so respectful and soft spoken and.... you make me happy.” She wheezed with every breath. “He’d love you, Sam. But I guess you’ll meet him without me, now….” She opened her eyes again. “Can you tell him ...I died helping people? And tell him it didn’t hurt much. That it was like falling asleep. Isn't that what you said it was like?”

Sam nodded down at her. He didn’t have a voice to put to an answer.

With a shaky hand, she wiped the tears off his cheeks.

\-- 

It had been hours and Sam had not heard from Dean. He had even gone down the hall at one point when Liv had drifted off, but he wasn’t there. All Sam found was Dean’s open laptop in sleep mode and a few pages of scribbled notes where he saw that, at some time in the morning, Dean had jotted down the names of the last two victims and written the word “dead” next to both. Now Dean wasn’t answering his phone. If there was any time for Sam to panic, it was now. Everyone they had tried to save from this had died, and Liv was up next. There was nothing keeping Sam from completely breaking down.

And yet, he didn’t break down, not outwardly. Because he knew he had already let Liv see him weaker than he’d like, especially since it was her that was suffering, dying. In a matter of hours she’d certainly be dead. She didn’t need to see him weak. So he didn’t let on that he was screaming in his head. He didn’t let on that Lucifer was coming up with a jingle for every single possible bad scenario running through Sam’s head. He didn’t show her that he was pretty sure they had reached a dead end, that everything they had tried, every avenue they had ventured down, had lead them nowhere.

They had failed.

Sam had failed her.

Liv’s head rested in Sam’s lap. She hadn’t said much in a very long time and she only moved to cough. Her breathing was shallow and troubled. Sam sat hollow and still, feeling utterly helpless and disgusted with how useless he had proven to be. He was numb and in disbelief. Tracks of tears glistened on his face, but his expression was blank.

Then suddenly, Dean exploded through the door as though he had kicked it in. There was fury in his eyes, a vial and a lighter in one hand, and Ruby’s knife in the other. Sam slid out from under Liv and darted off the bed.

“Prop her up, she needs to be sitting up,” Dean instructed.

Sam obeyed. Liv was barely cognizant of what was going on around her.

Dean grabbed a dirty, glass plate from the desk next to the ice bucket and brought it to the bedside table. Sam watched him without question. Dean set the vial and the lighter next to the plate, dug into his back pocket and pulled out a strip of paper with writing on it, then turned and handed the knife to Sam.

“I’m gonna lay this out, then light it,” Dean explained. “When I start reading this, you bleed into the flame.”

Sam’s eyes set and he didn’t have to say a word for Dean to know he was ready. Dean poured the contents of the vial out across the plate in the formation of a symbol he was recreating based on a drawing from the stip of paper and before Sam could even make out what it looked like, Dean had clicked the lighter. The contents went up in sparks. Dean reached over to Liv and yanked one hair from her head and tossed it onto the flame. The firey symbol sizzled.

 _“Undo huius carmine,”_ Dean began, stepping back so Sam could get to the plate. _“Sanet hoc infirmum!”_

Sam brought the knife to his palm. As soon as his blood hit the flame a burst of air swept through the room, blowing everything around. Dean struggled to keep hold of the strip of paper.

_“Est ista maledictio!”_

Liv jerked away from the headboard she was leaning against and started convulsing violently. Her arms and legs shook, her neck threw her head back and forth, and it was all Sam could do to keep from interrupting and trying to stop it.

_“Auferre quod homo!”_

As abruptly as she started to convulse, she stopped, falling flat back onto the bed. Then her chest was lifted and soon it was like her whole body was being held up by some invisible force. The boys watched on with wide eyes, but Dean didn’t stop reading the words. Over the wind of the spell, over the roar of the flame as it jumped and glowed, he read on.

_“Desinit nunc vale!”_

Liv’s jaw fell open as she hovered above the bed and without warning a dark wispy mist was ejected from her mouth. It tore out of her like it was trying to escape, then it hovered at the ceiling like a storm cloud on the wind. Then it was gone. Liv dropped hard back onto the bed and the flame blew out. Nothing of the symbol was left on the plate but ash.

The boys rushed to the bed. Liv was already sitting up on her knees, looking around like she wasn’t sure what had just happened to her. Her startled face jumped from Sam to Dean and back.

“O? Did it work?”

“What do you feel?”

She took in deep breaths over and over again that didn’t catch in her throat. She ran her hands over her ribcage, then down her legs and back up over her shoulders. “I... !“ she exclaimed in disbelief. “I don’t feel it anymore. It’s gone!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact, the Latin that Dean is reciting actually translates to: "undo the spell heal this person take away what is making this person sick this curse ends now bye." I'm real creative.


	8. Chapter 8

“The morgue?” Liv asked, cocking her eyebrow. “You had to break into the morgue?”

It was the next day and after so much time of not being able to eat much of anything, Liv was finally sitting at a diner with the Winchesters, eating a good meal before they left town, and listening to Dean explain just how much trouble he got into while piecing together that counter-curse. There hadn’t been a good time to go into his story in the aftermath of healing Liv. All she wanted to do was clean herself up and truly sleep for the first time in days. And the boys had needed to sleep, too. 

“You bet your ass I did,” Dean bragged. “Finding the recipe for that cure was nothing compared to sneaking past that security guard. C’mon, it’s not like he’s guarding the crown jewels. I mean, who wants to break into the morgue?”

“ _You_ did, Dean,” Sam snarked.

“Yeah, but how often can that possibly happen? Why does he have such a stick up his ass?”

Sam leaned back against the booth, letting his arm sprawl out across the top of the seat and slide around Liv’s shoulders. It felt good to relax for the first time in days. It felt good to see Liv with color back in her cheeks, no tears staining her face, no racing the clock for her life. And just a day before he had believed he’d never feel this way again, so he paused for a second and took her in: the way her eyes squeezed shut when she laughed and the way she’d react to feeling his touch and the way she’d lean towards him when he reached for her.

She caught him watching her and she responded with a big smile and another one of those starry-eyed lingering looks, but she didn’t feel stupid about it anymore. She couldn’t. She’d have been an idiot not to look at him like that after what he had done for her. He had saved her life, he had been with her every second as she circled the drain, and he was the reason she held on for as long as she did. She told him that the night she was cured and planned to make sure he remembered it with every smile she ever gave him from then on.

“God, you guys are embarrassing,” Dean mumbled through a bite of his burger.

“So,” Liv started, snapping back to their conversation and ignoring Dean’s gibe. She counted off the ingredients for the spell on her hand, “DNA from the vessel that cast the spell, my DNA--?”

“Graveyard dirt," Dean continued for her. "And a few other regular weirdo things you need when dealing with witchcraft. Oh, and Sam’s blood. The _‘blood of a lover,’_ as that Gaius guy put it. He helped me translate that crazy spell into Latin.”

“You called Gaius?” Sam asked.

“Yeah. Without Missouri’s people, there’s no way I would have gotten everything handled in time.”

Liv elbowed Sam in the ribs. “It’s a good thing you thought so quick on your feet right at the beginning.” She grabbed his other hand, bandaged up around the cut, and brought it to her lips to kiss it.

Sam smiled, but looked down, then changed the subject. “So Dean, after you told me the origin, I did some digging and I have a possible ID for our two demons.”

“You were up nearly two days straight researching for your life, then we finish this job so you can finally rest and you do _more_ research?”

“Shut up, I had to know why this happened.” Sam pulled out his phone and clicked through his notes. “Apparently what we were dealing with was some kind of pattern that matches ancient Celtic demon lore. Demons who come around to cause chaos or disaster. However, it’s not just for the hell of it. Sometimes it’s to gather energy which is what I think our cafe guys were up to.”

“What were they gathering energy for?” Liv asked.

“Not sure, but the lore states that there are types of demons that feed off the pain they inflict on people. Well, this kind of spell not only caused physical pain for days, but emotional turmoil, dealing with fears and such.”

“It sounds about right,” Dean agreed.

“But the lore I was sifting through said the demons who do this usually terrorize people for just a little while, then disappear, like they’re filling up a reserve and then blending back into society.”

“So, let me guess,” Dean interjected. “You did some _more_ digging.”

“Yeah,” Sam continued, smirk across his face. “I checked to see if there were similar cases like what was going on here in the past few decades and it turns out similar unexplainable spikes in deaths have occurred every fifteen years, like clockwork, in different parts of the country dating back as far as I could dig around online.”

Liv and Dean looked slightly stunned. It was terrible to hear this had been going on for so long, but a bit of relief washed over them both, regardless. They hadn’t been able to save the victims in the hospital, something none of the three of them could shake, but at least maybe they had stopped this cycle from ever starting over again.

The three finished eating and got up to leave. It was then that Sam’s phone rang. He answered with a smile as they exited the restaurant. “Hey! Yes, she’s doing even better today. Yes, I think so, she’s right here.” Sam handed Liv the phone, mouthing _‘It’s Missouri.’_

Liv put the phone to her ear. “Hello?”

 _“You_ do _sound well.”_

“Oh, thanks! I owe you so much.”

_“I knew those boys would figure it out. I just hoped what I could provide them would be helpful.”_

“It saved my life.”

_“I’m glad I could be of service. I wanted to check in and talk to you last night but Sam said you were already asleep. Makes sense, you’ve had the hardest week of your life.”_

“Thank you. Really.”

_“You’re welcome, sugar. You take care, now. Hand me back to Sam.”_

Liv obeyed and Sam continued through the parking lot in conversation with Missouri Moseley, but Liv hung back catching Dean by the wrist, tugging him to a stop instead of allowing him to follow his brother to the car. He swung back around towards Liv with raised eyebrows and a slightly startled expression.

“I just wanted to say,” she began clumsily, “that I’m really thankful for everything you did.”

There was an awkward pause so Dean responded. Awkwardly. “Don’t mention it.”

“I mean, and I’m sorry--” she continued. “About the cafe--”

“C’mon, that wasn’t your fault.”

“I know I’m a lot to put up with, I’m always around now, you and I don’t really get along, and you basically only tolerate me because of Sam--”

“-- _Hey_ \--!”

“--but you helped save my life so I just wanted to clear the air, like… officially, I guess.”

“Look what happened at the cafe _happened_.” He looked quite troubled. “We were both… I mean --I don’t know-- I didn’t have to push your buttons on the job, that was--” He shook his head. “But if you think I only did what I did this week for Sam’s sake, O…” He searched her face, hoping she could just understand what he was trying to convey without having to make him say it, because Dean didn’t like ‘chick flick moments’ even if they were with a chick. “I didn’t try to save you just for Sam. I didn’t even really try to save you just for you. I did it because” --he shrugged dramatically-- “ _because_ I needed you to make it.”

It wasn’t what Liv expected to hear. She knew he would have never let her die if he could help it, even if he absolutely hated her, but to hear him say in his own way he didn’t mind having her around, that he may even liked having her around, kind of shocked her. She blinked up at him, but because she knew he didn’t really like chick flick moments, she just nodded with a smile then turned to head towards the cars. But then, she felt Dean whip her into a tight hug, leaning his chin on her head so that her cheek rested against his chest. He had never hugged her like that before. In fact, Liv realized it might have been the first time he’d ever willingly hugged her at all. She was surprised but also so grateful she tightened her grip around his waist.

When he pulled back, Liv had tears in her eyes.

“Woa, dry up, ya sap.”

“Shut up, it’s windy out.”

“You guys coming?” Sam shouted from across the lot. He was leaning against Liv’s car, his arms crossed, watching them with a grin.

“Yeah let’s hit the road,” Dean shouted back, walking next to Liv. “You sure your grandpa won’t mind us popping in all of a sudden like this?”

“No,” Liv replied. “He’ll love it.”

 


End file.
